Tirana massively improved since I was last here seven years ago; the standard narrative places responsibility for this firmly at the feet of progressive mayor Edi Rama. There’s no doubt that Rama has had an enormous and generally positive impact on the city, but that narrative fails to take into account the role that the citizens of a city play in making and remaking that city. For a few days, that included me.1
The city is an act of consensus. It’s a negotiation from which it is difficult to remove yourself, except by physically leaving. Those who remain are the raw material from which the city is built; the construction of the city reflects those people and shouldn’t be mistaken for the city itself. TIrana feels like it’s on the move, and that’s not the result of painting a few buildings in bright colours.
So the new TIrana reflects a new generation of Albanians, that much is clear.2 Nowhere clearer than in Blloku (the Block), an area populated almost entirely by young people, especially at night. Decent bars with free wi-fi, upmarket shops with well-dressed assistants, pavements that aren’t punctuated by neck-breaking holes. From the Sky Club Cafe you can watch it all passing as the tower rotates – but then you can’t help but notice the rest of the city.
Tirana rolls three ways. The old communist-era apartments are still standing, the worse for wear and perpetually in need of repair. The new capitalist-era construction is going up, glossy and magazine-friendly, but limited to a few key areas. Meanwhile the future of the city is being written on the periphery – urban sprawl, particularly in the direction of the airport, is where most newcomers to the city end up. Illegal and improvised housing is the future of urban development – hacking the city.
You’ll find people who argue that setting up community wi-fi, mixing virtual and physical spaces, and even graffitti are all examples of hacking the city. They’re not. Hacking means getting into the guts of a thing and gripping it, shaping it to suit your purpose, not skateboarding in a car park. The people who hack the city are the ones building extra floors on their apartment building, extending blocks into grey areas, stealing electricity from the grid, throwing up kiosks on street corners.
The cities of the Balkans occupy an odd space between the first and third world,3 and their future is probably the best we can hope for in our future. First world cities won’t be able to sustain their infrastructure, tending towards decay; third world cities won’t manage to construct the infrastructure that defines the industrial west, and so they won’t feel that decay, but they will suffer the indignity of being perpetually hacked by their inhabitants.
It’s a mistake to look at cities as machines that can be fixed – they’re an act of consensus, remember? The only way the city will survive is if the planners and the hackers keep negotiations open and open-ended, continually plastering and patching and reinventing. Hacking the city is the only real option we have and, to that end it’s those communist-era apartments that show the way, not the shiny new luxury apartments,
- I’m hoping to get to SAM in Basel for the Balkanology exhibition, and to get hold of a copy of Prishtina is Everywhere soon. [↩]
- Albania of course being know for its relatively young demographic within Europe. [↩]
- Deliberate use of archaic terms signifying familiarity with their usage! [↩]
Tags: albania, Tirana, urban planning
“Hacking means getting into the guts of a thing and gripping it, shaping it to suit your purpose, not skateboarding in a car park. The people who hack the city are the ones building extra floors on their apartment building, extending blocks into grey areas, stealing electricity from the grid, throwing up kiosks on street corners.”
One of the great (two) lines in blog history. Bravo, Cuz.